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10.2.1 Notes for the C Programmer

The switch statement is also available in the widely used C programming language. There are, however, some differences between the statement in Octave and C

• Cases are exclusive, so they don’t ‘fall through’ as do the cases in the switch statement of the C language.
• The command_list elements are not optional. Making the list optional would have meant requiring a separator between the label and the command list. Otherwise, things like

  switch (foo)
    case (1) -2
    …
  

  would produce surprising results, as would

  switch (foo)
    case (1)
    case (2)
      doit ();
    …
  

  particularly for C programmers. If doit() should be executed if foo is either 1 or 2, the above code should be written with a cell array like this

  switch (foo)
    case { 1, 2 }
      doit ();
    …